Translating linguistic variation in Egyptian literature

Mohamed Saad Ali

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Title
Translating linguistic variation in Egyptian literature

Abstract
In order to describe the sociolinguistic reality of the Egyptian community, certain Arab-Egyptian writers are inserting linguistic variation into their writing. This non-standard use of language presents major challenges for translators. This study focuses on analysing the translation of diatopic and diastratic variation in two modern Egyptian novels: Ô les filles d’Alexandrie (Al-Kharrat, 1990) and Les femmes de Karantina (Eltoukhy, 2013). Based on examples drawn from our corpus, we examine the translation strategies adopted by the translators to render the regional dialect and local culture of Alexandria from Arabic into French. The analyses reveal that the translators use a wide range of creative strategies to handle non-standard language use in translation.

Keywords
diatopic variation, diastratic variation, Egyptian literature, translation, sociolinguistics

DOI 10.17462/para.2022.02.03